Friday, July 28, 2017

Again, back in New Hampshire. The trolls have scrapped the format of my
earlier e-mail link over the winter; this is a new site, Fresh History,
which I hope gets to you all through the ever-talented ministrations of
George Pequignot.

As Donald Trump buddies up with Vladimir Putin in Hamburg I keep hearing
reverberations of 1945, when Joseph Stalin and the ailing FDR laid out
the parameters of postwar Europe in 1945 at Yalta. Meanwhile, a British
scientist under KGB control in Los Alamos, Klaus Fuchs, was filling his
notebook with the critical formulas and emerging technology that would
permit the Soviet Union to come up with an atomic bomb of their own
months after Hiroshima. In D.C., Alger Hiss was reassuring the liberals
around Roosevelt.

Just now the primary dupe in Washington would seem to be the president
himself, whose gratitude is only too plain for the timely nudges the
Russians provided his hapless campaign that helped him stumble through
to a sort of victory. Surviving Cold Warriors in Washington, alarmed at
Trump's reference to NATO as obsolete and beyond skeptical about the
wily Putin, are alarmed that Trump might be quite capable of feeding
Eastern Europe into the meatgrinder of his own ever-famished
self-esteem. What they seem to be missing is the largely ignored
recognition throughout the ex-Communist bloc that too ambitious a
territorial engorgement usually leads to a cosmic bellyache.

Perhaps the first president to comprehend this was Richard Nixon.
Universally reviled at the moment in the aftermath of Watergate,
perhaps Nixon ought to be reconsidered as the author of much of the
progressive legislation Donald Trump and his crew of reactionary
sellouts are in such a hurry to scrap, from the Environmental Protection
Agency and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the Racketeer
Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO, Bob Kennedy's
inspiration) and the Witness Protection legislation that led to the
breakup of the Mafia. Having recognized the hopelessness of the
misbegotten struggle in Viet Nam, Nixon sent my friend Maurice Williams
to China to sound out Mao and open the way to the Paris Peace Talks.
Williams would remember Richard Nixon as the most intelligent among the
several presidents for whom he undertook troubleshooting missions.
Nixon understood that the war was a burden to the Chinese too. Soon
afterwards Henry Kissinger had pressured the Soviets out of Egypt and
the Middle East.

When positioning ourselves vis-a-vis today's Russia, we ought to keep in
mind just how the Russian state that Putin has taken over turned into
what it is. General John Reppert, a St. Petersburg friend who found
himself the primary Russian-language translator for our military
delegation in Moscow during the Gorbashev years, has filled me in on
details that don't seem to be commonly available. The Reagan
administration's breakthroughs in Star War technology left Russian
scientists stunned, at least a generation behind. More immediately, the
essential realization that the Comintern appear to have absorbed was
that empire and great power status had now become intolerably expensive.
That led to the release of the Soviet grip on the East Bloc -- Poland,
Hungary, Bulgaria, finally -- with misgivings -- the DDR. But even the
fourteen secondary republics that made up the USSR seemed to cost a lot
more than they contributed, and by 1991, rather abruptly, the Supreme
Soviet under Gorbashev's rather shaky leadership had cut them all loose.
Containment had paid off in a major -- and unexpected -- way!

In many quarters -- certainly among old KGB hands -- this was a blunder
that Putin would not scruple to label treason. Much of the old Russia's
industry was located in largely Russian-speaking Ukraine. The Crimea
was Russia's primary port on the Black Sea, vital to both commerce and
the Russian navy. With its faltering Third-World economy, dependent
largely on oil exports, Russia had pretty much eviscerated itself, and
its ruling oligarchy was subject to acute sellers' remorse. Putin would
attempt a recovery.

Having themselves briefly abandoned Great Power Status, the Russians are now attempting to
recoup. How far they get is going to depend on us.

Wednesday, June 7, 2017

I know. Months have passed. It has been a long winter here in Florida. My major accomplishment seems to have been the repackaging of the first novel of The Landau Trilogy, The Hedge Fund, with new covers and a very readable format. Available on Amazon Books, at Haslam's in St. Petersburg, around the struggling planet. The two successor volumes, Wet Work and Comanche Country, are also available on Amazon even as we work on final details. One reader responded to The Hedge Fund by observing that he got so excited as he read that he was afraid the cops would move in and arrest him. Get the novel and see how you feel.

Another reason I haven't been writing these blogs is that the conventional media, from the on-air comedians to CNN to The New York Times to The Washington Post have been covering the early months of the Trump presidency so comprehensively, so acutely, that nobody seemed to need me. It did surprise me that outrage and astonishment are so general here at Moscow's involvement in our affairs. This has been standard operating procedure probably since the Thirties. In 1992 Scribners published a book of mine, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA, that tracked in detail the involvement of Carmel Offie and Frank Wisner, the socialite director of operations in the early Agency. Wily and utterly self-serving, it would become clear afterwards that Offie was under the control of the KGB all along. Throughout those same Cold-War years, as Richard Helms confided to me during several long interviews, most of the information the CIA was processing came through the headquarters of General Reinhard Gehlen, once Hitler's intelligence chief and subsequently our pick to handle secrets for the Bundesrepublik. Gehlen, as it developed, was completely penetrated by the KGB.

At Richard Helms' insistence I managed to corner James Critchfield, who had been the CIA officer posted in Gehlen's Apparat in Bonn. Critchfield spoke no German, and a lot that was going on clearly went by him. Definitely an inside operator, Critchfield would reappear in my book Bobby and J. Edgar for having been spotted, reportedly, both in Dealey Plaza and later in the basement of the Ambassador Hotel the evening Bob Kennedy was murdered.

One week in 1997 I joined a group of perhaps a dozen American writers on intelligence as the guests of the KGB retirees association in Moscow. Over discussions at dinner I discovered that these Soviet spymasters were more than conversant with all these background details. Intelligence stalwarts around Langley were not, and were shocked when The Old Boys appeared. Currently, however, it is on the must-read list there for officers-in-training.

So Russian intelligence has been interested and involved in our business for quite a while. That they would land on Donald Trump, with his many bankruptcies, cannot be much of a surprise. Given The Donald's devouring feelings of inadequacy, how could they go wrong?

Meanwhile, the rest of us mostly lie there like an unwilling patient whose appendix is about to burst.

About Me

Published BooksEdward Kennedy: An Intimate Biography (2010)Bobby and J. Edgar (2007)The Nature of the Beast (2002)The Shadow President: Ted Kennedy in Opposition (1997)The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA (1992; 2002)The Mellon Family: A Fortune in History (1978)The Education of Edward Kennedy (1972; 1980)The Ski People (1968)